'Undo' Alternatives - SmartTimer and Review App Discussion

For myself and for some others, the Time Tracking app has been great for giving a slight pause in ticket updating and can help to avoid the 'oh no!' situations that have created demand for an undo feature in Zendesk.

We're currently developing some apps that include a timer similar to the Time Tracking App. The latest one, 'SmartSolve', is due in the marketplace soon, and currently includes a very basic timer. However we want to do a lot more with this.

So... if we're going to reinvent the Timer - then it makes sense to get community feedback on the features that would be desirable. What are your best or worst timer features? What features are a waste of time and could be dropped?

The Review app mentioned will work with the Timer, to pop up whenever there is a public comment and will actually show the comment being made - ideally just as it will look once submitted, and should provide even greater opportunity to spot a problem. Undo features are rarely perfect - my gmail undo has saved me a lot of hassle, but there's also been plenty of times that I've realized an issue just after the opportunity to undo has passed.

What should we aim to achieve with the Timer, Review and our SmartSolve app, and how should these work together?

Join in and leave your thoughts here.

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For the record, BizStudio is an independent, NZ based business. We develop third party apps to extend Zendesk. We've been using Zendesk Support ourselves for almost 10 years and have been closely involved in the community over the years. We develop apps that meet our own needs, whilst also keeping close to other Zendeskers to hear what ideas they have to improve customer support.

8 Comments

So far we have our SmartSolve app which offers a configurable pop-up whenever solving a request. This promotes review and verification of chosen ticket fields as well as making it much easier to find missed compulsory fields when solving a request.
Especially up for discussion is how to handle the wide range of possible needs for different businesses and users.
The current SmartSolve app includes a replacement timer so that users of the timetracking app can still have a time measure.
Also now on the development plan is a feature that allows for review of the comment being made, before sending it to the end user. This would display for every comment made.
What thoughts are there around how to handle all these things occuring at once.

Hands down our main hope here would be for an "undo-after-really-seeing-the-submission-as-it-is" feature, primarily to allow public comments to be retracted, or just converted to internal, before notifications (emails and .targets) are actually sent.

The key thing is the the ability to undo/retract after the comment is rendered and visible in the support web page. That change from editor layout to carved-in-stone layout is what seems to jolt one back to reality after an accidentally public response (or one where that should-have-been-deleted garbage is suddenly visible).

Since it's an "undo" feature, it seems like it would be most intuitive to have it *follow* the time log entry, since one might still be on auto-pilot between submitting and logging time.

Back to reality -- I realize that your app will not have the luxury of reinventing Zendesk, so some reasonable approximation of what I describe above would also be much appreciated.

Other smaller comments --

I think that you are indicating that the app would (or at least could) use the same ticket fields as timekeeper? That would be great, to reduce transition friction. (Especially for reports via Insight and API).

It's such a relief that the current time tracker finally allows us to enter negative entries, to reverse time tracker pollution. From a readability perspective, even better would be the ability to mark an entry as invalid (and then enter an additional correct entry as one can now enter a diff correction), but the current capability suffices.

I don't really see the point of the timekeeper dialog countdown process. Sometimes one needs to think about it for a moment, and if the moment takes too long, it's just a nuisance.

In the dreamland category -- an impressive feature would be explicit 2-way connection between the time log and the comments, so that with every comment would show (maybe as a flyover) the time logged on that comment, and conversely, for each time log entry, it would be easier to see which comment it pertains to (maybe with a flyover of the first chunk of that comment's text, when applicable).

Hello Tobias, the first version is with the Zendesk marketplace team for approval currently. This is truly a beta version with styling a bit lacking.
Hopefully it will be released in the next week or so.

@jonathan , as discussed the 30 second countdown is built into Zendesk and cannot be avoided. However we are working on a different angle to address this.

I don't believe we can use the same fields as the time tracking app as they are connected only to the Zendesk app, but we'll be investigating this. We hope we can at least retrieve current time and more it to our app fields.

As discussed elsewhere Jonanthan, regarding 'Undo', we cannot change core Zendesk functionality. What we are proposing is our 'Review' app. The review app will pop up a modal window for each public comment submitted which will contain the public comment (or part thereof) and a notification along the lines of "You are about to send this comment to [Requester name/email] and CCs (details).

It could include a mandatory delay (how long? customisable?).

The idea is that our Timer app will work along with this displaying in the same modal window if they happen to pop at the same time (ie, Review is probably public comments only, Timer is probably all updates).

If the app is being solved as well, there could be quite a large window containing all 3 apps content.

Should we perhaps make a compulsory checkbox for agents to confirm they have reviewed each part of content?

Open to any suggestions - no promises on what is possible in the first few versions though.

Do you have a link to more info on your apps? I couldn't find anything online easily, or are these not released as yet? Perhaps I stumbled onto this thread and have read things completely out of context!!

I have been using the Zendesk Labs Time Tracking app for some time, and built some analytics so we can track our support contract customer "hours" each month. Really we are tracking billable minutes spent vs their monthly quota.

What I'd love to see is the ability to track Billable and/or Non-Billable time after each Ticket update.

Then I would be able to report on both the actual time we spent resolving issues, and also how much we were passing onto the customer as billable etc.

A bonus would be the ability to:

- play with settings to allow rounding the suggested time spent minutes up to nearest 5 or 10minute blocks rather than it suggesting we add 33 mins, we add 35 (it makes the detailed reporting much more friendly.

- perhaps built in capability to set organization monthly quota/minutes, allowing us to track how many hours left

I haven't spent a huge amount of time looking at other apps out there, so perhaps some of the analytics side is already being catered for by something else. But the basic timer capability for billable / non-billable would be handy.